'THE INTELLECTUAL JOHNNY APPLESEED OF THE COUNTERCULTURE': A conversation with Whole Earth Catalog founder, Merry Prankster, and woolly mammoth de-extinctionist Stewart Brand.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

HAS ANYONE LIVED a more interesting, influential, and inspiring life than Stewart Brand?

Born in 1938 and educated at Stanford, Brand was a Merry Prankster who helped conduct Ken Kesey's legendary acid tests in the 1960s. His guerilla campaign of selling buttons that asked "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" pushed NASA to release the first image of the planet from space and helped inspire the original Earth Day celebrations. From 1968 to 1971, he published the WholeEarth Catalog, which quickly became a bible to hippies on communes and techno-geeks such as Steve Jobs, who famously quoted its parting message: "Stay hungry, stay foolish."

Brand helped shape early techno-culture and cyberspace by reporting on the personal computer revolution and interacting with many of the key figures responsible for what became known as cyberculture. His ideas were instrumental in the creation of one of the earliest online communities, The WELL. He also co-founded The Long Now Foundation, which seeks to deepen the way people think about the past and the future.

In a series of books on such topics as the MIT Media Lab and the rise of "eco-modernism," Brand has delineated a unique strain of ecological thought that embraces technology as a means of salvation and liberation rather than a destructive force that must be stopped. His current passion is Revive & Restore, a leading organization in the "de-extinction movement" that is using biotechnology to bring back plants and animals including the American Chestnut tree, the passenger pigeon, and the woolly mammoth.

Brand is the subject of the new documentary, We Are As Gods--a line from the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog--which takes a long, critical look at his life and work. In March, Nick Gillespie interviewed Brand about his experience at the far frontier of social and cultural change.

Reason: I love the early description of you in the film as "the intellectual Johnny Appleseed of the counterculture." Do you think that's an apt summary of who you are?

Brand: I was an Appleseed guy for the counterculture and I've been other mythic characters for other people, in the sense that the Whole Earth Catalog was really a casting of seeds.

Johnny Appleseed was really trying to help out the farmers, the people living out on the landscape in America. There was a living-out-on-the-landscape aspect to the 1960s. The people the Whole Earth Catalog helped in terms of communes did not last more than two or three years at the most. The communes all failed and we all went back to town, having learned very important things, such as "free love is not free" and "when you rely on one guy for all the money, it's going to get distorted" and "gardening is hard" and "domes leak."

We got our noses rubbed in all our fondest fantasies at an early age. We were so lucky to have done that--it was way better than graduate school.

The movie begins and ends with your work with Revive & Restore. Why is it important to bring the woolly mammoth or the passenger pigeon or the American chestnut tree back from extinction?

As it happens, all three of those projects make a lot of ecological sense. There is a gap in the ecosystems those creatures were in that has not been filled by anything else. If you bring them back, you not only increase biodiversity; you increase resilience.

But maybe the deeper thing is that we get caught up in our kind of tragic sense of human damage, not only to each other but to the natural world. Most of the damage was done unintentionally. The idea of undoing that damage is potentially very freeing. I think it's a frame changer, the way seeing photographs of...